Collected Short Fiction, page 282
“It’s just the spot I wanted, Ron,” he was saying eagerly. “We’ll set up the tower on the ridge. The atomic beam itself will reach to all these mountains. And the Basin, when it is warmed, will serve as a sort of furnace to moderate all the continent, with wind-convection, and warm rivers flowing down through the passes.”
The breathless wonder of his dream caught me for a moment. I saw lush verdure replace the white desolation of ice, saw green forests blanket the black flanks of those mountains that had known no life for ten million years. I saw busy cities, even, rich plantations spread beneath the summer-long day, mines, railroads, factories.
“Once this land was warm,” Bell’s quick voice had run on. “Coal forests, in the Permo-Carboniferous———”
That brought back my haunting dream: the fantastic beauty of Maru-Mora, and all the alien horror of the Sleepers. Jerry Harding’s voice reached me faintly from the plane, and I recalled the grim premonition that had struck me as we crossed the Barrier. I shuddered, and tried to forget.
“Our first problem is to build living-quarters,” I told Bell. “If we don’t—well, this is mild summer, compared to what is coming.”
And we set to work at once, to establish a winter camp. For the plane we cut a sort of hangar in the ice, covered it with protecting blocks of snow. Our living-quarters also were hewn in the glacier, walled with the packing-cases that held our supplies, roofed with snow packed on tar-paper.
That occupied the most of our time until late in March—until the sun, wheeling ever lower and redder and huger and colder, peered for the last time through a pass in the Mountains of Uranus, and did not return.
None of the others had had any previous polar experience. All but Harding were willing to follow my leadership in building the camp. But he made himself difficult, to put it mildly.
He wanted Bell to begin erecting his atomic battery at once. But Bell said that three months or half a year might pass before the installation could be completed. And during that time, I knew, without good living-quarters we must perish. Bell and Jerry did their best to convince Harding of this necessity, but he remained sullen and unwilling.
Harding’s disturbing change of manner seemed always more extreme. There was no visible physical difference in him—unless, as I sometimes thought, his pale blue eyes had turned a little darker. But something had totally changed his nature. Had I been superstitious enough to credit such a thing, I should have thought him literally possessed.
For many years he had been a close friend of mine. The long ruddy face beneath his untidy mass of yellowish hair was still unmistakably familiar. Yet sometimes, as I caught the new ruthless hardness in his eyes, I thought I looked upon a stranger.
He became increasingly dictatorial, quarrelsome, even vicious. He was savagely rude, even cruel, to young Tommy Veejring. He cursed him, made rough jokes at his expense, ridiculed his youth and timidity. Twice I saw him knock Veering down, when they were at work together, with no excuse at all.
And the thin young engineer, through some quirk of dog-like meekness, accepted all Harding’s offensiveness without any show of resentment. Indeed, so far as I could tell, he liked the big man all the better for this abuse. He kept Harding’s company, and came to side with him in any argument.
What most distressed me about Harding, however, was his unkindness to Jerry. He developed a way of saying sharp cruel things to her, displaying a venomous malevolence that I had never suspected in him.
One day at table, for example, saying that his tea was cold, he flung it into Jerry’s face, and began cursing her savagely. I should have hit him, then, but Jerry ran to me, wiping the scalding liquid out of her eyes, caught my arm, and begged me not to strike him.
THE rude dwelling finished at last, we unloaded Bell’s equipment and carried it to the chosen site: a bare outcropping of living granite, just above the camp. Working beneath a canvas shelter—for, since the sun had gone, it was growing bitterly cold—we began drilling holes in the rock to anchor the legs of the tower.
As we cleared the crust of ice from this ledge, Tommy Veering made a curious discovery. In a crevice he found a number of tiny fossils: lichens, several small ancient spiders, two minute degenerative hymenopterous insects, and a small ammonite. The specimens were not so remarkable as their state of preservation. For every tiny limb and segment was intact, diamond-hard.
Veering showed the find to Harding, who became oddly excited over it.
“These are the original bodies!” he exclaimed, peering at them with a pocket microscope. “There has been no mineralizing, no substitution as in ordinary petrification. They have been just somehow—frozen!”
Mere heat, however, did not thaw them. The effort seemed sheerest folly—for the presence of the extinct mollusk alone was proof that the things had existed unchanged through geological ages’—but Harding and Veering, in our rude little laboratory, made continual effort to revive the fossils.
“But they aren’t fossils at all,” Harding insisted. “There has been no change or deterioration since they were alive. The microscopic structure is perfect, every cell intact!”
His weeks of work only deepened the puzzle. It was about this time, incidentally, that he began to wear colored glasses, saying that the long hours at the microscope strained his eyes.
“The newer physics,” he told me once, “would say that these creatures are in a space-time stasis. The spectroscope shows that the characteristics of space about their atoms has been altered, warped, so that no change or motion is possible—not even any time!”
Behind the dark lenses his eyes glittered with a strange excitement.
“If we could reverse that warping force, unlock the stasis, they would live again, unaware that even a second had passed.” His voice was feverish, husky, terrible. “And that secret, if we learn it, will be a weapon greater than the Gorgon’s head.”
Frankly, I thought the project mere folly if not insane delusion, for I had increasing doubts of Harding’s mental balance. But I did not discourage it, because it occupied his time and left him less troublesome.
The erection of Bell’s automatic apparatus, meantime, went steadily forward. Veering proved himself a skilled and brilliant technician. By midwinter, it seemed, the battery might be in operation. All the ice would be thawed from the Basin, Bell promised, by the coming of the sun.
It is hard to give a true record of those weary, dragging months of winter night. The shadow of dire catastrophe had overhung us from the first. My old irrational conviction of approaching tragedy had slowly deepened. Life in the Antarctic is a grim enough business at best, and Harding’s increasingly evil nature made it, at times, almost insupportable.
But, aside from all that, there had been something else—something that Bell, and perhaps even Jerry, must have sensed more keenly than I.
When I say that the camp was haunted, it sounds like superstitious nonsense. Yet, almost from the day of our arrival, I had a curious, uneasy feeling that it was—that some strange intangible Presence hung about us, alertly watching every move we made, listening to every word we said.
Bell and Jerry, I think, were more conscious of it than I. For I often saw them silent, with cocked heads and strained intent faces, listening.
“It’s nothing, Ron,” Jerry said once, when I asked her what she listened for. Her tired face tried to smile. “I’m just nervous, I guess, worried about poor Aston. He has changed so, grown so much worse—have you noticed?”
And Bell, as we worked together about his tower, often paused to peer away across the ice. He laughed when I spoke about it, but his white face remained very grave.
“Just a feeling,” he said, “that Something is watching us—trying to speak to us, perhaps.” His thin frame abruptly shivered. “I’ve a queer feeling, Ron,” he confessed, “that we shouldn’t thaw the ice. I’m somehow afraid.” His dark tortured eyes stared away again; his voice sank low. “Yes, afraid—of what we might uncover.”
The warning of that singular dream came to me again. I felt an impulse to tell Bell about it, but checked my tongue. He was troubled enough already; I didn’t want to increase his anxiety.
For still I believed it a dream. I dared not regard it as anything else. Sometimes I found myself staring northward, toward the Mountains of Uranus, wondering if the Seeker’s purple pylon might indeed stand on some summit there. But I could never see it.
MARCH had gone, and most of April, when the thing happened that crystallized all my vague apprehensions and shattered the routine of our life at camp—that started the dread avalanche that did not end until all the world had been overwhelmed in horror.
The whole camp was asleep, after a long shift spent bolting together the sections of Bell’s tower. I started suddenly awake, alarmed, yet not knowing what had roused me. For an instant I lay still, listening.
The wind, which had blown steadily for many days, had died. At first I could hear only a soft, weird rustling—the whisper of the aurora.
But suddenly, mingled with that eery sussuration, I caught another sound—a sound terribly familiar, and yet incredible: a thin far wailing, infinitely sweet and infinitely sad. It held all the heartbroken loneliness of the world, caught in slow eery minors, so faint they mocked the ears.
It was the piping of the Seeker of my dream. The voice of Maru-Mora! Or had I merely dreamed again? For it had ceased.
Breathless and trembling, uncertain that I had heard anything at all, I donned furs and hastened up out of our ice-burrow, into the polar night. The unutterable, appalling splendor of it caught me, held me for a moment motionless.
Complete calm had fallen. The air, curiously brilliant with frost, was absolutely still. The clear sky was purple-black, the southern constellations pale beyond the most brilliant auroral display I ever witnessed. Pure silver, crystal green and living rose, its curved rays sprayed from beyond the pole. Its rustling, bannered hosts marched endlessly, whispering immemorial secrets of outer space.
With an effort I broke the aching thrall of its beauty. I stumbled up to the ledge beside Bell’s unfinished tower, and peered away across the snow. It lay glittering and brilliant, dimly flushed with auroral color, drifts massed fantastically.
Painful as the ring of glass to a violin bow, I heard that sound again: an eery minor threnody, a resistless call of provocative promise.
And far away, beyond black grotesque hummocks of bare ice, I saw an incredible thing. Above the silver snow, plain in the aurora’s radiance, it drifted. Flew—wingless! A tapered spiral, flaring upward. A woman’s bust, golden-furred, cradled in its shimmering cup. An elfin woman’s head, golden-crowned, proudly scarlet-crested. Slim golden arms that beckoned.
It was Maru-Mora, the Seeker of my dream!
And the dream, then, was real. The purple pylon did tower somewhere from the peaks beyond the ice. And lovely Karalee, to whom I had promised in the dream to return, must be living reality!
A cold tide of horror flowed suddenly over my soul; for the black Tharshoon, the scaled and monstrous Sleepers of the ice, must then be also real—and waiting to be wakened, if we should thaw the polar ice.
I had ignored the Seeker’s warning, and Karalee’s tearful appeal. What, now, was to be the penalty?
Maru-Mora’s piping came again, alluring with its uncanny haunting sweetness, terrible with immemorial pain. The aurora flooded the sky again, and once more, far away, I glimpsed the alien beauty of the Seeker.
She flew low but swiftly, calling, golden arms beckoning. And beneath her, stumbling frantically after her, was—a man!
Caught in a queer paralysis of fascinated dread, I watched as he toiled up a slippery bank, tottered perilously along the brink of a blank crevasse. The shining alien siren fled away before him, mocking, elusive. He followed her over the flank of a gleaming drift. They both were gone.
It was a moment before I could recover myself, put down a sense of outraged unreality. Then I shouted, ran along the ledge toward the drift where they had vanished.
What the Seeker might be, dream or illusion, phantom or alien living being, I knew not—but I did know that only terrible death could await any man lured out across the ice. Was that her way to stop our work?
The aurora dimmed suddenly. In the starlit darkness I saw nothing beyond the drift. Thin echoes from the ice were the only answer to my calls. The eery song had ceased, the singer and her victim vanished.
Shivering, from the shock of eldritch horror as much from the bitter cold, I stumbled back to the camp. My shouts had roused the others. Jerry Harding, bewildered, anxious-eyed, met me as I came down into our burrow.
“What was it, Ron?” she whispered apprehensively. “What happened? I woke with the most dreadful feeling. And where is poor Merry?”
“Bell?” I gasped.
“He’s gone from his bunk,” she told me.
And I knew that it was Meriden Bell who had followed the Seeker across the snow.
You will not want to miss the thrilling chapters of this fascinating story in next month’s WEIRD TALES. We suggest that you reserve your copy at your magazine dealer’s now.
Dreadful Sleep
A thrilling tale, a romantic and tragic tale, a weird-scientific story of the awakening of the fearsome beings that lay in dreadful slumber under the antarctic ice, and the strange doom that befell the world
The Story Thus Far
CAPTAIN RON DUNBAR, the polar explorer who tells the story, at first refused to pilot Doctor Aston Harding’s expedition to Antarctica in 1960—the dreadful year of the Time Fault. He was alarmed by the change in Harding, who once had been a friend. Now the man seemed strangely altered, almost possessed!
In the end, however, Ron agreed to go—for the sake of Meriden Bell.
It is Bell’s atomic battery with which they hope to thaw the ice cap. Another discovery of his, a deadly bacteriophage, stolen by his hunchbacked assistant, Mawson Kroll, and sold to the Asiatics, had killed a million Americans in the last war. Bell was exonerated, Kroll convicted and executed. But, still burdened with guilt, Bell wishes to make atonement—by giving humanity a new continent.
Maru-Mora came to Ron that night, and warned him not to go. A being of alien beauty, she had the bust of an elfin queen, golden-furred and strangely crowned, cupped in a flying opalescent shell. She drew Ron out of his body, in what seemed a dream, and carried him to the pylon of purple crystal in which she dwells, on a nameless polar mountain.
There she pointed out the Sleepers—monstrous invaders from beyond the earth, frozen under the ice. If the ice is thawed, she warns, they will wake, resume their long-arrested conquest of the planet.
Translator of the warning was Karalee, strange lovely girl who lives in a rock-hewn apartment beside Maru-Mora’s pylon. She and Ron loved at once, even in that dream. But she forbade him, tearfully, ever to seek her.
When he woke, however, Ron’s common sense rejected the warning of the dream. At the very beginning of the antarctic night, he flew the little party to the camp beyond the pole: Harding and his loyal wife Jerry, Bell, and a young engineer named Veering.
Slowly the atomic equipment was assembled. Harding’s strangely altered nature, to Jerry’s distress, became more ill. He spent his time studying the queer crystal fossils that Veering had found under the ice.
Ron had sensed an intangible presence haunting the camp. It was in April when he woke and saw Bell staggering away across the ice, lured by the shining specter of an elfin woman flying in a shell.
He knew, then, that Maru-Mora was real, her warning true.
She had called Bell away to stop the thawing of the ice!
The story continues:
7. For Love of Maru-Mora
ONE thing was clear. Bewildered dread still fogged my mind. But I knew that Merry Bell had wandered out alone across the ice—knew that, without aid, he soon would die of cold. I told the others that I was going after him.
Aston Harding looked at me oddly. The dark glasses that he had worn since he began research on Veering’s crystal fossils gave his long ruddy face a curiously sinister look.
“Yes, go after him, Dunbar,” he rasped unpleasantly. “He’s got to finish his job here. Then he can go where he likes,” Jerry Harding winced from the tone of that.
“You must find him, Ron,” she begged compassionately. “Poor Merry—he has had no experience on the ice. He’ll suffer. He has seemed so anxious lately—somehow tortured.”
Whether it would take an hour or a week to find Bell, I didn’t know. Still following that eldritch siren, he had vanished beneath the fading aurora. I could only follow in the same direction. Hastily I put on trail clothing, while Jerry packed a little food for me, and a tiny alcohol burner. In ten minutes I set out, the light pack slung on my shoulders, carrying a flashlight and a compact little Hamlin gyro-compass. A grim impulse turned me back at the doorway, to pick up my automatic pistol.
Striking out northward, along the ridge, I was pondering the riddle of Maru-Mora, the dark enigma of the Tharshoon, the haunting question of Karalee’s reality. Soon, however, the difficulties of the trail were enough to claim all my attention.
The going was not at all good. The ice was cracked and fissured, heaved into jutting masses. Over all was sifted the white drift snow that might here be half an inch deep, there hide a hundred-foot crevasse.
I was able, for the first half-mile, to follow the trail of Bell’s boots. The dying witch-fires of the aurora still gave a little aid. The thin beam of the electric torch cut a small disk of flickering silver from the gray, ghostly starlight.
The trail ended, however, at the edge of a long steep slope of clear, wind-swept ice. Beyond, some stray gust may have covered it with snow. I couldn’t find it again.
I pushed on northward, at last, following only the compass. The Mountains of Uranus lay in that direction, seventy miles away, a week’s march, perhaps, over this rugged, treacherous ice—farther, I knew, than Bell could ever make it.
